The Accidental Embroiderer

Reflections

Here’s another little picture that sold quickly at the show, and that attracted a lot of interest. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph the piece that went to the show (and which got sold) so this is just a scan of a trial stitchout, and there's more than one mistake in it. And this is another of those pieces that looks better "in the flesh" than as a scan - the real picture just looks sort of dreamy and misty, while the scan is very sharp and shows up all the details of the stitching. However you can still get a general idea of what it's like. It’s just another example of playing around with using stippling as an essential part of the design rather than as a generalised textural element. It’s a very simple construction: I just digitised a deer silhouette, then flipped it and used the shape as a template to trace around and create the texture on the water surface.

The Reflected Deer (complete with mistakes...)

This is another of those pieces that’s stitched onto a painted background, but the background is simple enough – just green at the top and grey on the bottom. The only tricky part was being sure that the painted fabric was aligned so that the horizontal division of the digitised design corresponded exactly with the horizontal division of the painted background. But there’s a lot of grass and reflected grass around the border of the two colours, and that covers a multitude of mistakes!

 

 

Pigeons again, and some Christmas mug rugs

Recently I’ve been musing about aspects of my childhood growing up in Chicago. When I was young I loved animals (still do!) but about the only wildlife I can remember from those early days were the flocks of pigeons that swooped and dived over the city. Not long ago I was playing around with the idea of how flocks of birds turn and change shape as they cross the sky, and I suddenly remembered those pigeons. I sketched a flock of birds and stitched them out over stamped grey rectangles in the background, to suggest the grey towers of downtown Chicago

Chicago pigeons

OK, the birds don’t look much like pigeons, and the Chicago pigeons weren’t exactly in these colours but somehow the bright colours suited them, and I had the childish idea that they probably would have chosen to be coloured like this if they could! This picture sold almost immediately at our recent show, which rather surprised me, as I didn’t think anyone else would see it the way I did

On another subject, the Christmas squares have been very popular, and I received a gorgeous picture from Jane in Kansas, showing how she used them. She says “I have stitched two of your Christmas squares as mug rugs. So I made them almost five inches square, hooped some polymesh and started stitching. I used a layer of batting and a layer of felt on the top and a layer of felt on the bottom. Then cut around the overhang.”

Jane's Christmas mugmats - careful cutting needed!

I had never thought of doing them like this, and I’m really surprised that Jane managed to cut so accurately around all those little bits of stitching sticking out over the edge. But it’s worked beautifully

The Pigeon Show at Turriff

I love agricultural shows, and one of the biggest and best in this area is the annual show at Turriff, on the Moray coast. Last time we were there I was fascinated by the competition for fancy pigeons – there were cages and cages of pigeons of all different kinds, and I couldn’t resist the idea of turning them into a panel of embroidered birds

The real pigeon show

This turned out to be a very big project. I drew and digitised nine different pigeons and stitched them out in greys, browns and white, using hand-painted and hand-printed fabric for the applique. All of them were stitched over squares of dull grey fabric, with stitched lines to suggest the bars of their cages and to give the feeling that they were all enclosed in small boxes. This repeated background also served to hold the nine birds together as a single composition

 

Four of the stitched pigeons

When it came to constructing the panel, I pieced the individual birds with the wrong sides together, so that the raw edges of the fabric were brought to the front of the panel. Then I frayed the fabric, rather as you would fray the edges of a rag quilt. This gave a three-dimensional feeling to the panel, and also served to emphasize the fact that the birds are separated into small boxes.

 

The finished pigeon panel

I have to confess that I really like this panel. I'll be showing it at the upcoming exhibition at Touched by Scotland, and the gallery owner is sure that it will be sold, probably to a pigeon-fancier (of which there are a lot around here) Oh well, as long as it goes to a good home I’ll be happy

Digitising someone else's art - part 2

Our nearest neighbours up here are the artist Frances Crawford and her husband. Frances has an almost magical ability to paint light and I’ve always loved her work. (http://www.strathdonart.co.uk/page12.html)

Recently she’s become interested in Japanese wood-cut prints and I also admire what she does in that medium. The other day I said that some of her prints would also look good in embroidery, and after a little discussion we agreed to try a co-operative experiment: Frances would do a drawing, which she would interpret in a Japanese print and I would interpret in embroidery

This is Frances’ drawing:

Forest pond - the original drawing

This is the print she made from it:

Forest pond: the Japanese woodcut print

and here’s my embroidery:

Forest pond: the embroidery

I was very pleased with the way the embroidery turned out. Unfortunately the scan doesn’t capture the most interesting part. The pool was made from painted fabric appliqueed on, and then overstitched with concentric circles of metallic silver thread, which gives it a very subtle gleam where the light hits it. So in real life the forest pool looks suitably glittering and silvery, and is a good tribute to Frances’ mystical and light-bathed paintings.

This month’s free designs: three Christmas squares

Cherri has reminded me that people are beginning to stitch for the holidays now, so maybe October’s free design should be Christmas-themed. Unfortunately I don’t have many (any?) good Christmas designs in my portfolio. When I sold designs on the Internet my former business partner would always try to get me to do Christmas collections, but they never really worked out very well - I think because Christmas motifs have been done to death and most of my attempts were either un-Christmassy or banal. However Cherri has reminded me of a small series of Christmas squares that I designed to be used on Christmas table linen, and these are more or less OK

Seeing that it’s Christmas, you can have three designs, not just one. They’re for the 4x4 hoop and each motif is stitched to overlap an appliqueed square. Try stitching the floating ribbons in metallic silver or gold, and the stars on the third design should be done in metallic gold

If you’d like these, as usual just drop a comment to the blog asking for the Christmas squares and I’ll send them out

 

 

Christmas square 1: holly

 

 

Christmas square 2: mistletoe

Christmas square 3: shooting stars